2015.10.05 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Miriam Schleifer McCormick, Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief, Routledge, 2015, 144pp., $145.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780415818841.
Reviewed by Peter J. Graham, University of California, Riverside
Some philosophers hold that truth, knowledge and rationality are valuable for their own sake. Some hold that we ought to believe only on the evidence, where this "ought" arises independently of morality and prudence. There is something normatively autonomous about belief, truth, knowledge and evidence. Miriam Schleifer McCormick disagrees. Her central contention in her provocative and dialectically engaging book is that the norms or ethics of action and the norms or ethics of belief are not separate but unified, that belief is just as much a part of our agency as action. The book has two parts: "Doxastic Norms" and "Doxastic Responsibility." Part I proceeds as a dialectical encounter with a. . .